By using Carbon Copy Cloner, you are not just making ordinary system backups that require the use of another hard disk in case the current one fails. Thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner, all your data along with the operating system’s data are stored on a bootable volume that can be instantly used.

Consequently, you can boot from your backup if your hard disk fails and return to your work and projects in a matter of seconds. This features, gives you time to replace the damaged drive at your convenience and restore all your data in one easy step.

Save space with incremental backups and accidental data loss

From Carbon Copy Cloner’s main window, you can quickly select the source and destination volume, select the files you want to include or exclude from the backup and even customize the backup process.

Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to create multiple backup profiles and decide what happens with folders and files that are present only on the destination and with the files that have been modified since the last backup.

In addition, you can prune archived content before copying files and constantly keep a certain amount of free space on the backup drive.

More experienced users can also access the Advanced Settings window and enable options such as “Run the deletion pass on the destination before copying new files”, “Replace a folder on the destination if the source item is not a folder” or “Calculate a checksum for every compared file” and “ Remove files on the destination that I have excluded from the backup”.

Schedule backups and take advantage of the built-in email notification system

As mentioned earlier, you can backup to hard drives, network drives and disk images and use subsequent backups and copy only the items that have been changes since the last backup.

In a nutshell, Carbon Copy Cloner is a powerful backup tool that allows you to schedule backup tasks on a hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, and is also capable of sending email notifications when a backup is complete or if errors occur during the backup process.

What’s New in Carbon Copy Cloner 5.0.4

Fixed the resolution of the task badge on Retina displays on High Sierra

When creating a disk image, the disk image is now formatted as APFS if the source is an APFS volume. CCC also creates the Preboot and Recovery volumes on these disk images so that they can be restored using Disk Utility (in addition to being restorable via CCC)

Items marked as hidden now stay reliably hidden on an HFS+ destination on High Sierra

Addressed an issue in which a task that specifies a remote Macintosh as the source or destination would re-try the connection too aggressively if the remote host was unavailable

Fixed the free space indicator for APFS volumes when viewing a volume’s details in CCC’s sidebar

Improved the drawing of the task outlook table when viewing a task group

Minor enhancements to the CCC command-line utility

The source/destination contextual menu items now more consistently refer to the underlying volume for a disk image, and mounting/unmounting the underlying network volume for a disk image now works. Also tweaked the subtitle offered when an underlying network volume is not mounted. Previously it said ‘”{sharepoint}” is missing’, now it says ‘”{sharepoint}” is not mounted’

The “Show Details” button in CCC notifications that are presented as alerts now correctly opens the Task History event in CCC

CCC now handles an undocumented Keychain Services error code that was occurring when CCC was trying to open its keychain for the first time (i.e. before the keychain yet exists). This resolves an issue that some High Sierra users might have encountered when trying to save a password to CCC’s keychain

Addressed an issue in which a backup task could stall while “Cleaning up” if the task was configured to unmount the destination volume, and Spotlight was dissenting the volume unmount